Eucalyptus in the cloud: researchers commercialize OSS project

The Eucalyptus project, which aims to provide open source infrastructure for cloud computing, is growing beyond its university roots and is heading straight for enterprise data centers. The key developers behind the project have launched a company with the intent of commercializing the technology, and have received $5.5 million in venture capital funding to get them started.

Eucalyptus can be used to build elastic computing environments‚Äîlike Amazon EC2‚Äîon top of conventional clusters. It provides infrastructure for automating virtual machine provisioning and management so that a cluster's computational resources can be made accessible to users in a more flexible way. It leverages the open source Xen hypervisor and it is designed to run on the Linux platform. Its management APIs are modeled after those provided by EC2, which means that it is largely compatible with tools that are built to work with Amazon's service.¬†